Taneční aktuality - Kiosk Festival

My writing about Kiosk Festival over at Czech Dance News:

https://www.tanecniaktuality.cz/en/reports/kiosk-festival-stuck-in-the-mud-at-humanitys-frontier

Thanks for the editing support!

Kiosk Festival Epilogue: 'Before and After'

 

Before every show comes a sense of nervous anticipation. The murmur of the audience dips with the house lights, a hush settles in, making a hollow in the room. Suddenly the faint sound of breathing is amplified, along with the slight friction of one surface rubbing against its neighbour, trying to find a good fit. Perhaps there is a creak from a floorboard backstage, as an actor slightly shifts their weight. Perhaps she was already prepared, and the creak comes from some mysterious, magical source - as unknown as the beginning of the universe.

So it was, perhaps, before the birth of humanity - supposedly the greatest show on earth. Did it ever really happen? Like any really good show, the time seems to have flown by. The reviews are in, and it's a mixed bag. There's plenty to celebrate, but at times, particularly towards the end, the cast an crew somehow seemed a bit lost. Was it supposed to go like this? Wasn't there a different script written for us? It seems, at some point, as though it became a bit difficult to focus on the narrative.

Over four days, the puddles under the overpass adjacent to STANICA Cultural Centre offered a backdrop to dramatic spectacle both humane and inhumane. We watched robots, humans, machines, screens, nothing, and each other, contesting the narrrative, each with their own claim to centrism. Day 4 added to this with Dead in the Pool (reviewed here back in May) and Exergonic Odyssey, an installation from collaborators Zebastian Méndez Marín, Lucia Kašiarová, Juraj Poliak, and Andrej Boháč, a vast underground playground of gags. The show fitted in perfectly with the often-playful approach to a serious theme.

 

From Milo Juráni's installation White Man and his Plan (to Save the World)

 Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Were the locals of Žilina impressed? It's hard to see how the theme of "After Human" can connect with the lives of Slovakia's third-largest city - it seems place of continuity of tradition, if nothing else. But the interruption of the festival to daily rhythms may yet prove meaningful. Bringing discourses such as posthumanism, non-human agency, robotic theatre, and the Anthropocene outside elitist spheres of academia and the Art World may meet some discomfort at first, and yet these are themes that are currently under acceleration, with the mainstream catching up on them only after it's too late. Kiosk 15, then, offered a unique opportunity to democratise these strands into meaningful stories, and placing them into a concrete a social context. Created partly as a response to the misanthropy and self-hate that characterises Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine, it stands as a meaningful, playful response to one of the darker lines of current times, fusing this with well-covered ground in the relationships between humans, technology, and environment.

 

Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Are performing arts the right mechanism to play with this theme? One one level, the inescapable humanism of the stage leaves no space for pure technological spectacle, necessarily re-inscribing the human into the sphere of existence that is, after all, largely becoming all its own making. On the other hand, theatre's own transience and immateriality make it an inappropriate metaphor for capturing the permanent effects of change - as though history is washed away with the curtain's close, as though tragedy ends with the exit of the audience. Where contemporary art is invested in the creation of objects and their proof, performance refers repetitively to our ephemeral and impermanent nature - "lights on" for the creation of life, "lights off" for its end.

Kiosk Day 3: Fragments, Humans + Machines

It turns out that as well as being a functioning train station, cafe, and stage, STANICA Cultural Centre also converts into a handy club. So after quite a lot of rain and some great spinning from DJ Laura Plis, it was hard to pick myself out of my flooded tent, complete with improvised fly and sticks as pegs, and switch on to the offerings of Day 3. No regrets. However, I confess that the shows of Day 3 are seen through something of a haze, not all of it from the fog-machines on stage.

C R ASH 

The first show of the day plunges us immediately back into darkness, offering glimpses and snapshots, elusive and half-lit traces. Smoke further obscures our view, and the top- and side- lit performers (Jazmína Piktorová and Tereza Kmotorková) propose a range of gestures and tableaus, perhaps hinting at fragments of a relationship (or several relationships) through time.  The scattered soundtrack (Jakub Mudrák) further splinters the stage into a ever-dividing room of pieces and half-pieces, performers perhaps struggling against a fading memory. Eventually, the movement (co-ordination by Daniel Raček) is drawn out into a type of crime scene, or a dependent relationship trying to struggle through snow, and the soundtrack dissolves into the pure noise of a blizzard.

C R ASH is an interesting experiment in the stagecraft atmospherics from Bratislava-based director Martin Hodoň, created together with the performers Kmotoroková and Piktorova. The movement is very much through emotional terrain, perhaps one or a series of relationships, as the description states, running the gamut of "love, pretense, defiance, illusion, violence, abandonment, forgiveness" and incorporating "family, partnership, and friendship" (so: most relationships then). There is a desperation about the work, as though it is urgently trying to show us something, which sits together with its visual focus, and creates a stage that - whilst seeming relatively defined - is also exceptionally busy with emotionality. It's a story mainly told through lighting, with a star of the show undoubtedly Lukáš Kubičina's lighting design, which jumps and slides through elusive illusions and shadows, pools and floods.

Photo: Banskej Bystrice, Marcela Záchenská

Such relational stage work relies heavily on the emotional quality of its connections and distances, and a sense of precision and control over the tools of the stage. For me, C R ASH doesn't quite nail it's collision of form and content. It doesn't quite control the emotional runaway train. But it comes close at times. To be fair, it's probably a show better suited to a late-night time, and the capacity of STANICA's S1 studio probably limits the intensity that can be achieved in realising the performance. But with such an abstract point of focus, the show really lives or dies on complete commitment and 100% execution - without this, it falls flat. There is an interesting conversation about whether this type of theatre should even exist - whether such a goal of precision and aesthetic aspiration is worthwhile, or whether it removes some of the wondrous and all-too-human ambiguities of stage. Nevertheless, C R ASH is far from an untidy 35 minutes in the theatre.